Stanley Donen’s “Charade,” voted to The Lantern’s 25 Essential Films List earlier this quarter, was described in that piece as “the one film that could have been directed by Alfred Hitchcock, but wasn’t.”
That’s a fair statement. The 1963 film, which tucked Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant into one of cinema’s most labyrinthine tales of political intrigue, benefited greatly from Hitchcock’s example – his cool, detached tone, his cool color scheme, and of course, his cooler-than-cool cast.
“The Truth About Charlie,” a remake of “Charade” opening nationwide tomorrow, has been greatly reworked by Jonathan Demme. Instead of the chic, upscale Paris of the earlier film, the director provides a grungy, modern necropolis. Rather than recording staid, stately visuals, his camera careens through the city’s back alleys and discoteches.
I have no problem with these stylistic modifications – there’s nothing more arbitrary than a shot-for-shot remake – but a thriller like this requires the sort of world-weary performances Grant and Hepburn provided in “Charade.” “The Truth About Charlie” doesn’t have them, and it suffers for it.
The plot is a relatively faithful update of the original. As the story begins, we’re introduced to Regina (Thandi Newton), a young British expatriate vacationing in France who barely begins an extramarital fling with a burly stud named Joshua (Mark Wahlberg) before learning that her rich-but-absent husband has been killed.
Hounded by French police who suspect she ordered the killing herself, Regina is told her husband is not the art dealer she believes him to be, but rather a special-operations fighter whose actions in combat could be described as less than valorous.
Back on the streets of Paris, she finds herself trailed by three shadowy figures, whose intentions seem as threatening as they are unclear, as well as an American intelligence agent (Tim Robbins) who pledges to protect her from those he claims are after her husband’s missing loot. The Wahlberg character becomes sort of a cross between hunter and protector – a guy whom she accepts as a lover, but who seems to have dubious motives of his own.
For viewers who have never seen “Charade,” this tortured material may be an alluring novelty. Despite the “complicated” times in which we live, today’s films rarely depend so completely on ambiguity to create suspense. To watch “The Truth About Charlie” is to hear distant echoes of an era in which the purpose of every movie character wasn’t spelled out in large red letters.
But alas, it is a hollow echo, since an ambiguous tone requires actors who can simultaneously suggest emotion while veiling the true passions and motives of their characters.
As the duplicitous Joshua – or perhaps his real name is something else altogether – Mark Wahlberg is all blank stares and facile earnestness. The character, once played to double-edged perfection by Grant, now seems like every European’s stereotypical image of the Dull American Male.
The idea that Regina would be so overwhelmed by the force of his milquetoast personality that she would keep the scoundrel around, thus putting her own life in jeopardy, is more than a bad plot device to keep the two leads together – it’s insult to women everywhere. Then again, as played by Newton, Regina is seems a few shades duller than the female protagonist in Donen’s version of the story.
As for Demme, it’s hard to blame him for the flaws that bring down “The Truth About Charlie.” After winning the Oscar for “The Silence of the Lambs” in 1991, the director – whose comic edge was wonderfully evident in “Stop Making Sense” and “Something Wild” – became a slave to the lure of the heavy-message movie, as if to prove his Oscar victory counted. As a result, audiences were made to suffer through the wildly overrated “Philadelphia” and the dreary, universally ignored “Beloved.”
With this picture, Demme seems in fine form again. His technique is dead-on, Paris looks great and the film is well-paced, coming in at a breezy 100 minutes. The poor guy just needed a better casting agent – or maybe Alfred Hitchcock’s Rolodex.
Jordan Gentile is a senior in journalism. He can be reached at [email protected].
